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No bread is an island

...entire of itself. (With apologies to John Donne!)

I live and breathe breadmaking. I’m an evangelist who would like everyone to make his or her own bread. I want to demystify breadmaking and show it as the easy everyday craft that it is. To this end I endeavour to make my recipes as simple and as foolproof as I possibly can.

I call my blog 'No bread is an island' because every bread is connected to another bread. So a spicy fruit bun with a cross on top is a hot cross bun. This fruit dough will also make a fruit loaf - or Chelsea buns or a Swedish tea ring...

I'm also a vegan, so I have lots of vegan recipes on here - and I'm adding more all the time.

About Me

Torn away from the bosom of my family at the tender age of 18 - and never lived in my home town of Blackburn again. The RAF took me to HK; After a hitch of four years I emigrated to Australia and joined the RAAF, which took me to HK where I met my wife of 43 years. I then joined GCHQ which took me (us, with 2 children now) back to HK. Retired at 55, trained as a teacher of adults, gained a 2:1 in Teaching and Training at Plymouth Uni (which I thought went well with the 2 'O' levels with which I left school). And I've been teaching breadmaking ever since. Now running 6 or 7 classes a week, plus the odd Saturday workshop. My passion is breadmaking - or perhaps I should say the teaching of breadmaking; I'm also very interested in early development; And I like to cook - but I consider myself to be pretty average. I have a wife, two children, a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law and three grandchildren, (who can all make bread) who come and stay with us in the holidays and half-terms. Away from my family, I'm happiest teaching a Family Learning group, with parents and children, none of whom have made bread before. I get a real buzz out of turning people onto breadmaking.

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Sunday, 27 November 2016

QUICK SEITAN RECIPE

300g baked seitan - enough for two Sunday roasts

I needed some seitan for the coming week, so I thought I'd cook some up whilst the oven was on for a Sunday roast. (More seitan info.)I used leftover spicy tomato sauce (from pizza-making yesterday), as a base.Recipe:200g vital wheat gluten4 dessertspoons nutritional yeast (nooch)2 teaspoons bouillon powder2 dessertspoons curry powder (I like a lot of heat - add to taste)Plus:200g homemade tomato sauce - made with a tin of tomatoes, blitzed, with mushroom sauce, soy sauce, vegan pesto (Marigold), Lingham's chilli sauce, mixed herbs.Method:Mix the dry ingredients, then add 150g of this to the tomato sauce. Stirring with a table knife, I found this was too wet, so I added another 25g of powder. It was still too wet, so another 25g of powder were added - then I kneaded this into a dough.300g of this were pressed into a small, oiled, roasting dish and baked, with a lid, for 30 minutes - whilst the oven was on for the roast potatoes, etc.

Cut into two pieces, one half for tonight's dinner, and the other in the freezer.

For Sunday dinner I have one of these halves, sliced, with some of the tomato sauce instead of gravy. The half in the freezer could be next Sunday's dinner or, chopped into chunks, become part of a chilli non carne.The other 150g I rolled out into a cutletNotes:This made 450g of seitan, the other 150g, pressed out into a circle about 10cm across and dry-fried for about 7-8 minutes each side, will make a seitan cutlet, which I will have for dinner tomorrow along with some curried potato wedges.

You get a more even thickness if you use a rolling pin - don't believe those other websites which tell you that this makes it tough - not true.

I had about 40g of the flavoured vital wheat gluten left. I've found it's always better to make more than you need, it saves having to flavour another 25g, then perhaps another 25g. I put the leftover in an old spice tub which I keep in the bag of gluten flour, so it's there next time I want to make seitan.